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Friday, February 22

On February 13 Riam Dalati, for years an on-site producer for BBC Syria, announcedon Twitter to his 20,000 followers that after a six month-long investigation he'd personally conducted, he could "prove without a doubt that the Douma hospital scene was staged” and “no fatalities had occurred in the hospital.”

Dalati added that he believed that an attack did happen (in Douma) but no Sarin was used and “everything else around the attack was manufactured for maximum effect.”

BBC brass quickly sprang into executive action, stating unsurprisingly that Dalati's conclusion was just his opinion. The Beeb had strongly promoted the video of the hospital scene that the White Helmets had provided the news media, which showed civilians being treated for effects of a poison gas attack. Media saturation coverage of the video in the U.K. and U.S. and another provided by the White Helmets had helped the British, French, and American governments rationalize missile strikes on Syrian Army facilities less than a week after the Douma hospital incident and place blame on Bashar al-Assad, Syria's President:

“These are not the actions of a man,” President Trump said of last weekend’s suspected chemical attack in a televised address from the White House Diplomatic Room. “They are crimes of a monster instead.”

Now a BBC producer was claiming he had proof that the poison gas attack at the hospital was a hoax. This was unacceptable to the British government. Mr Dalati still clings to his job but changed his Twitter account to "protected" status while the Russian government requests that he share the evidence he collected to back up his claim.To my knowledge Dalati's stunning announcement that a hoax had been perpetrated and the uproar that followed wasn't reported in the American mainstream media -- not on radio, television or in the press; the news was only available at a handful of sites on the internet. Fast forward to February 19.

For three weeks there's been saturation media coverage in the U.S. of an alleged hate crime in Chicago, Illinois against a black, homosexual American TV actor named Jussie Smollett that on police investigation turned out to be a hoax staged by the actor himself; this, according to Chicago's Superintendent of Police Eddie Johnson during a press conference February 19 to announce Smollett had turned himself in to police to face the charge of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report. In the state of Illinois that's a Class 4 felony, which can carry a prison sentence of up to 3 years. It was some presser. The superintendent, an African-American and lifelong Chicago resident, was furious that Smollett had dragged his city through the mud to carry out a vicious, self-serving hoax that mocked the seriousness of hate crimes and cost the Chicago police department -- and FBI -- buckets of money and many man hours to thoroughly investigate Smollett's complaint.

The commissioner was also furious at America media commentators and celebrities for glorifying Smollet as a victim of homophobia and racial injustice as soon as the story broke.

His remarks at the presser touched off a media uproar.

America's President jumped into the uproar; taking to Twitter he asked Smollett, "What about MAGA?"

President Trump reacted Thursday to the news that Jussie Smollett has been charged with falsifying a police report about a racist and homophobic attack by men allegedly shouting “MAGA country.”

“What about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments!? #MAGA” Trump tweeted, referring to his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” [...]

Thursday, February 21

The Trump administration is preparing a public argument for war on Iran. The Washington Times ...[exclusively reports that administration officials claim] that Iran is allied with al-Qaeda and thus could and should be attacked.

[...]

At the recent conferences in Warsaw and Munich, the Trump administration failed to gain any European support for its anti-Iran strategy. Iraq has likewise rejected all U.S. attempts to position it against Iran. If the U.S. wants to attack Iran it will need to go it alone. Its 'allies' west of the Persian Gulf will give financial support but are not a serious military force. What they can do though is to ramp up terrorism against Iran.

To support the claim in the above last sentence, Bernhard quotes M.K. Bhadrakumar, a widely respected defense/foreign policy analyst who served India for many years until his retirement as a Career Diplomat (as distinct from a diplomat appointed from outside a country's foreign service).BEGIN BHADRAKUMAR QUOTES:

[T]oday, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are Israel’s covert allies in West Asia. They are joined at the hips in the project to overthrow the Iranian regime.We may expect that the [Afghanistan-Pakistan region] could become a major theatre from where their covert operations would be launched with the help of Pakistan under the watch and protection of the US to destabilise Iran. Tehran has repeatedly alleged that the two Arab states are working in tandem with the US and Israel.

END QUOTESTehran's allegations about Saudi Arabia are old news; it's been open knowledge for about three years that S.A. is allied with Israel on several matters, including Iran. (Bhadrakumar surely knows this). As to the UAE, they don't always march in lockstep with S.A. but have given every indication that they do regarding Iran.

Now is the Washington Times just passing along gossip? The paper is a known conduit for U.S. military views and propaganda. So the Times report can be taken as an indication that the Trump regime is ratcheting up its case for overt U.S. military action against Iran.

Regarding Bernhard's observations about the Europeans (he's referring specifically to the west European members of NATO): That the Europeans don't support Trump's policy toward Iran doesn't mean they'd refuse to militarily support a U.S. military action against Iran. They've militarily supported the U.S. for far less reason in Syria, just as the U.S. reluctantly gave military support to the French-British military actions to overthrow the Qaddafi regime in Libya.

So I think the European stance would need to be much stronger than now if they really want to distance themselves from U.S. policy toward Iran. They might support Trump's machinations against the current regime in Iran, but one has to make a distinction between Trump and NATO. Any direct U.S. military action against Iran would bring pressure on the most powerful European NATO regimes to go along, and I think the British regime, at least under Theresa May, would go along under any circumstance.

This could precipitate the kind of showdown at the UN that we saw regarding the Bush regime's claim that Saddam Hussein had to be overthrown. But from what I see at this time, I'd say the Germans and French would want to avoid a showdown. Both governments have their eyes on Beijing and want as much as possible to present the Chinese with a united Western front.

So it comes down to just how willing Trump is at this time to launch a regime-change operation against Tehran. It's possible this latest round of saber-rattling is actually Trump's reaction to the cold shoulder he got in Warsaw and Munich. He might be signaling to the Europeans that unless they give more support to his sanctions against Iran, he'll just have to drag them into open war against Iran.

Whether or not this is the case, Trump is presiding over a fractured Republican party; if he wants to win reelection he'll have to mollify or at least 'string along' the large hawkish element in the party, which can't wait to make war on Iran.

Yet against these considerations is the larger picture that Bhadrakumar paints, in which the United States is only one significant player (emphasis in the following quotes is provided by MoA):

BEGIN BHADRAKUMAR QUOTES

After last Tuesday’s fedayeen attack in Iran’s southeastern region of Sistan-Baluchistan bordering Pakistan (in which 27 Iranian troops were killed in circumstances eerily similar to what happened in Pulwama), top Iranian generals have openly alleged the role of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Unsurprisingly, Saudis and the Emiratis who are bankrolling the Pakistani economy, have come to call the shots in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Tehran is expecting turbulent times. [...][W]e have an explosive mix today, such as we have never come across before in our region and which no one could have foreseen previously — except, indeed, the astute mind of Hamid Karzai — whereby the Taliban leadership has come under immense Pakistani pressure to eschew its “Afghan-ness” and accede to the US wish list on an open-ended [US] military presence in Afghanistan (which is also backed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well as Israel.)

END QUOTES

This big-picture view of the situation has ended up on the cutting-room floor in the 'Iran Movie' that hawkish Republicans (and Democrats) and their buddies in Saudia Arabia and Israel have produced.

As to recent Iranian talks with the Taliban and Bernhard's speculation that Tehran could try peeling the Taliban away from Pakistani influence as a way to protect Iran's eastern flank from terrorist attacks -- it's to be remembered that the Taliban are Sunni fundamentalists who've remained allied with al Qaeda through thick and thin. So while they have cooperated with Iran on occasion, it's open to question how far cooperation would extend at present on either side.

Iran has adopted a new ideology: it is not an Islamic or a Christian ideology but a new one that emerged in the last seven years of war. It is the “Ideology of Resistance”, an ideology that goes beyond religion. This new ideology imposed itself even on clerical Iran and on Hezbollah, who have abandoned any goal of exporting an Islamic Republic: instead, they support any population ready to stand against the destructive US hegemony over the world.

For Iran, it is no longer a question of spreading Shiism or converting secular people, Sunni or Christians. The goal is for all to identify the real enemy and to stand against it. That is what the West’s intervention in the Middle East is creating. It has certainly succeeded in impoverishing the region: but it has also elicited pushback from a powerful front.

This new front appears stronger and more effective than the forces unleashed by the hundreds of billions spent by the opposing coalition for the purpose of spreading destruction in order to ensure US dominance.

That, too, American war hawks in Congress -- and President Trump -- have ignored.

Thursday, February 14

It's a little late in the day for a greeting but Happy Valentine's Day anyhow! Yes yes I'll be returning to the blogosphere soon, maybe Monday. I've been involved with family matters. I'll also mention that John Batchelor is scheduled to return to the airwaves on Monday. He's been recuperating from surgery and radiation treatments for his base of tongue cancer, which has become an epidemic in men over 50. In his case the cancer was caught before it metastasized so the prognosis for him is very good. As to why this cancer has been striking older males, thereby hangs a tale, some of which John related the other day to fellow New York radio talk show hosts Bernie and Sid on their show. Here's the podcast for the brief discussion. And there are scientific reports on the internet about the cancer. But the short answer is that beyond establishing its association with HPV (human papillomavirus) scientists are still trying to understand the cancer; in the meantime, oncologists have gotten skilled at treating it. The key to surviving it, as with all other cancers, is early detection.Regarding the photos, they're from one of those websites that copy items from other sites then make the reader click through one slide after another; in this case the slides show what a day at the office is like for wildlife photographers. Some of the photos are likely staged but I've seen enough of such photos to know that once wild critters overcome their caution about human interlopers they can be very curious about the cameras and what the interlopers are doing with them. Except for meerkats. They couldn't care less about cameras. These very warlike little creatures always have a member of the tribe on guard duty. So their view of a standing human, including a wildlife photographer, is that the top of its head makes a great lookout post. Speaking of critters, the March edition of The Atlantic features a fascinating article titled Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition.One of the show-stopping observations is found in the last sentence of this passage:

Mammals in general are widely thought to be conscious, because they share our relatively large brain size, and also have a cerebral cortex, the place where our most complex feats of cognition seem to take place. Birds don’t have a cortex. In the 300 million years that have passed since the avian gene pool separated from ours, their brains have evolved different structures. But one of those structures appears to be networked in cortexlike ways, a tantalizing clue that nature may have more than one method of making a conscious brain.

A couple years ago I studied videos posted at YouTube on the behavior of cockatoos who live with humans and are treated as a member of the family. From this, my impression is that cockatoos are very 'conscious' beings and what's more have strong emotions that are not merely imitative of their human companions. I remember one video of a cockatoo, left alone for hours with the family dog, angrily trying to explain to the lady of the house what its day had been like. She kept interrupting the rant to sternly tell the cockatoo that she didn't like to be spoken to in that tone.

This only added to the cockatoo's obvious frustration and the feeling in its voice was reflecting this, as it continued trying to explain within the limitations of its language, and she continued interrupting with a lecture on the importance of politeness.

At one point the camera panned to the dog, who was sitting on the floor as close to the two as he could get and intently watching their exchange. There was something in the dog's expression, as if to say, 'Well I have no idea why the bird is having a bad feather day' -- that caused me to recall from other videos I'd seen that cockatoos cannot bear the sound of incessant barking -- and that very likely dogs who live with cockatoos know this. The same thought might have crossed the woman's mind at some point because suddenly she kissed the cockatoo on the beak. That immediately stopped the rant and clearly mollified the bird: finally, a little understanding and sympathy.

But that cockatoo's effort to communicate its frustration to the most important being in its life and its additional frustration that the being was not listening was clearly on display. It very nearly brought tears of empathy to my eyes.We've all been there, haven't we?********

THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER HAS engaged in behavior so lowly and unscrupulous that it created a seemingly impossible storyline: the world’s richest billionaire and a notorious labor abuser, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, as a sympathetic victim.

On Thursday, Bezos published emails in which the Enquirer’s parent company explicitly threatened to publish intimate photographs of Bezos and his mistress, which were apparently exchanged between the two through their iPhones, unless Bezos agreed to a series of demands involving silence about the company’s conduct.

In a perfect world, none of the sexually salacious material the Enquirer was threatening to release would be incriminating or embarrassing to Bezos: it involves consensual sex between adults that is the business of nobody other than those involved and their spouses. But that’s not the world in which we live: few news events generate moralizing interest like sex scandals, especially among the media.

The prospect of naked selfies of Bezos would obviously generate intense media coverage and all sorts of adolescent giggling and sanctimonious judgments. The Enquirer’s reports of Bezos’ adulterous affair seemed to have already played at least a significant role, if not the primary one, in the recent announcement of Bezos’ divorce from his wife of 25 years.

Beyond the prurient interest in sex scandals, this case entails genuinely newsworthy questions because of its political context. The National Enquirer was so actively devoted to Donald Trump’s election that the chairman of its parent company admitted to helping make hush payments to kill stories of Trump’s affairs, and received immunity for his cooperation in the criminal case of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, while Bezos, as the owner of the steadfastly anti-Trump Washington Post, is viewed by Trump as a political enemy.

All of this raises serious questions, which thus far are limited to pure speculation, about how the National Enquirer obtained the intimate photos exchanged between Bezos and his mistress. Despite a lack of evidence, MSNBC is already doing what it exists to do – implying with no evidence that Trump is to blame (in this case, by abusing the powers of the NSA or FBI to spy on Bezos). But, under the circumstances, those are legitimate questions to be probing (though responsible news agencies would wait for evidence before airing innuendo of that sort).

If the surveillance powers of the NSA, FBI or other agencies were used to obtain incriminating information about Bezos due to their view of him as a political enemy – and, again, there is no evidence this has happened – it certainly would not be the first time. Those agencies have a long and shameful history of doing exactly that, which is why the Democratic adoration for those agencies, and the recent bipartisan further empowerment of them, was so disturbing.

Indeed, one of the stories we were able to report using the Snowden documents, one that received less attention that it should have, is an active NSA program to collect the online sex activities, including browsing records of porn site and sex chats, of people regarded by the U.S. Government as radical or radicalizing in order to use their online sex habits to destroy their reputations. This is what and who the NSA, CIA and FBI are and long have been.

[graphic]

IF BEZOS WERE the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic.

That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.

In December 2017, Amazon boasted that it had perfected new face-recognition software for crowds, which it called Rekognition. It explained that the product is intended, in large part, for use by governments and police forces around the world. The ACLU quickly warned that the product is “dangerous” and that Amazon “is actively helping governments deploy it.”

“Powered by artificial intelligence,” wrote the ACLU, “Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces.” The group warned: “Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.” In a separate advisory, the ACLU said of this face-recognition software that Amazon’s “marketing materials read like a user manual for the type of authoritarian surveillance you can currently see in China.”

[graphic]

BuzzFeed obtained documents showing details of Amazon’s work in implementing the technology with the Orlando Police Department, ones that “reveal the accelerated pace at which law enforcement is embracing facial recognition tools with limited training and little to no oversight from regulators or the public.” Citing Amazon’s work to implement the software with police departments, the ACLU explained:

With Rekognition, a government can now build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone. If police body cameras, for example, were outfitted with facial recognition, devices intended for officer transparency and accountability would further transform into surveillance machines aimed at the public. With this technology, police would be able to determine who attends protests. ICE could seek to continuously monitor immigrants as they embark on new lives. Cities might routinely track their own residents, whether they have reason to suspect criminal activity or not. As with other surveillance technologies, these systems are certain to be disproportionately aimed at minority communities.

Numerous lawmakers, including Congress’ leading privacy advocates, wrote a letter in July, 2018, expressing grave concerns about how this software and similar mass-face-recognition programs would be used by government and law enforcement agencies. They posed a series of questions based on their concern that “this technology comes with inherent risks, including the compromising of Americans’ right to privacy, as well as racial and gender bias.”

In a separate article about Amazon’s privacy threats, the ACLU explained that the group “and other civil rights groups have repeatedly warned that face surveillance poses an unprecedented threat to civil liberties and civil rights that must be stopped before it becomes widespread.”

Amazon’s extensive relationship with the NSA, FBI, Pentagon and other surveillance agencies in the west is multi-faceted, highly lucrative and rapidly growing. Last March, the Intercept reported on a new app that Amazon developers and British police forces have jointly developed to use on the public in police work, just “the latest example of third parties aiding, automating, and in some cases, replacing, the functions of law enforcement agencies — and raises privacy questions about Amazon’s role as an intermediary.”

[graphic]

Beyond allowing police departments to “store citizens’ crime reports on Amazon’s servers, rather than those operated by the police,” the Amazon products “will allow users to report crimes directly to their smart speakers,” an innovation David Murakami Wood, a scholar of surveillance, warned “serves as a startling reminder of the growing reach that technology companies have into our daily lives, intimate habits, and vulnerable moments — with and without our permission.”

Then there are the serious privacy dangers posed by Amazon’s “Ring” camera products, revealed in the Intercept last month by Sam Biddle. As he reported, Amazon’s Ring, intended to be a home security system, has “a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate data belonging to any person: a live, high-definition feed from around — and perhaps inside — their house.”

Among other transgressions, “Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world.” Biddle added: “This would amount to an enormous list of highly sensitive files that could be easily browsed and viewed. Downloading and sharing these customer video files would have required little more than a click.”About the Ring surveillance in particular, the ACLU explained:

Imagine if a neighborhood was set up with these doorbell cameras. Simply walking up to a friend’s house could result in your face, your fingerprint, or your voice being flagged as “suspicious” and delivered to a government database without your knowledge or consent. With Amazon selling the devices, operating the servers, and pushing the technology on law enforcement, the company is building all the pieces of a surveillance network, reaching from the government all the way to our front doors.

Bezos’ relationship with the military and intelligence wings of the U.S. Government is hard to overstate. Just last October, his company, Blue Origin, won a $500 million contract from the U.S. Air Force to help develop military rockets and spy satellites. Bezos personally thanked them in a tweet, proclaiming how “proud” he is “to serve the national security space community.”

[graphic]

Then there’s the patent Amazon obtained last October, as reported by the Intercept, “that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice.” In particular, it would enable anyone using the product to determine a person’s accent and likely place of origin: “The algorithm would also consider a customer’s physical location — based on their IP address, primary shipping address, and browser settings — to help determine their accent.”

All of this is taking place as Amazon vies for, and is the favorite to win, one of the largest Pentagon contracts yet: a $10 billion agreement to provide exclusive cloud services to the world’s largest military. CNN reported just last week that the company is now enmeshed in scandal over that effort, specifically a formal investigation into “whether Amazon improperly hired a former Defense Department worker who was involved with a $10 billion government contract for which the tech company is competing.”

Bezos’ relationship with the military and spying agencies of the U.S. Government, and law enforcement agencies around the world, predates his purchase of the Washington Post and has become a central prong of Amazon’s business growth. Back in 2014, Amazon secured a massive contract with the CIA when the spy agency agreed to pay it $600 million for computing cloud software. As the Atlantic noted at the time, Amazon’s software “will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community.”

Given how vital the military and spy agencies now are to Amazon’s business, it’s unsurprising that the amount Amazon pays to lobbyists to serve its interests in Washington has exploded: quadrupling since 2013 from $3 million to almost $15 million last year, according to Open Secrets.

[graphic]

JEFF BEZOS IS AS ENTITLED as anyone else to his personal privacy. The threats from the National Enquirer are grotesque. If Bezos’ preemptive self-publishing of his private sex material reduces the unwarranted shame and stigma around adult consensual sexual activities, that will be a societal good.

But Bezos, given how much he works and profits to destroy the privacy of everyone else (to say nothing of the labor abuses of his company), is about the least sympathetic victim imaginable of privacy invasion. In the past, hard-core surveillance cheerleaders in Congress such as Dianne Feinstein, Pete Hoekstra, and Jane Harman became overnight, indignant privacy advocates when they learned that the surveillance state apparatus they long cheered had been turned against them.

Perhaps being a victim of privacy invasion will help Jeff Bezos realize the evils of what his company is enabling. Only time will tell. As of now, one of the world’s greatest privacy invaders just had his privacy invaded. As the ACLU put it: “Amazon is building the tools for authoritarian surveillance that advocates, activists, community leaders, politicians, and experts have repeatedly warned against.”

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If President Trump quits Syria it won't stop me from hating him for what he's done to Syria. I do not forgive such things. But I would campaign for him if he runs for president again. Leave Syria, Mr Trump. Go, in the name of God, go.********

Tuesday, February 5

I've been noting a number of attempts to excuse President Trump's actions regarding Syria. The excuses boil down to the one invoked by many Germans living under Nazi rule, and encapsulated in the infamous phrase, "Wenn der Führer nur wüsste “ -- If Hitler only knew.This defense continued even after the war's end, with many Germans refusing to believe Hitler could have known about, much less directed, the genocide exposed during the Nuremberg trials:

It wasn’t until Eichmann’s trial in 1961 that the world finally learned, and Germany confronted, the full extent and monstrosity of the final solution. The extermination of the European Jews was not the improvised handiwork of a few rogue Gestapo agents, operating secretly under the Fuhrer’s nose; it was the result of a well-planned, state-wide campaign of extermination, carried out with the willing participation of state ministries and the military at all levels. The idea of “If only the Fuhrer knew” wasn’t a mere excuse exonerating Hitler, it was an apology for the whole nation of Germany.

The government of the United States of America under the regimes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, along with the entire NATO leadership, were knowing participants in the genocide perpetrated against Syria's Alawites. If not for the Russian intervention in Syria the perpetrators would've gotten away with wiping out the Alawites.

Who planned the genocide? Recently I wrote that the hallmark of evil is the enormous complexity it creates to cover its tracks. I'd guess the prime suspect would be the Saudi regime but so many governments were involved and there's been so much blame-shifting it might take another decade to untangle the mess.

In any case, the Russians blew the lid off when they exposed that the U.S. and its coalition had been aiding and abetting Islamic State in Syria. This happened when President Vladimir Putin displayed satellite photos at a G20 summit in Turkey, photos that showed large convoys of oil tanker traffic making brazenly routine runs between IS-controlled territory in Syria and Turkey's border. It would have been impossible for the U.S. command to overlook the convoys, yet they took half-hearted measures only after they learned the Russians were preparing to present evidence about what was happening.

Caught red-handed, a grim-faced President Obama met with Putin on the sidelines of the summit, in what unfolding events suggested was his attempt to sweep the outrage under the rug by striking a 'deal' with the Russians. But even if Putin agreed to a deal, Obama repeatedly misled the Kremlin right up until the time he left office about the plan for Syria.

President Trump has carried forward the plan despite any of his rhetoric to the contrary. To assume or hope that he hasn't known what's been going on Syria, or that all the evil is the work of a cabal of neocons he can't control, is a kind of mental self-blinding.

To ask why about any of this is an attempt to psychoanalyse the devil -- just about the most useless thing one can do. Once I recounted on this blog that I had to learn the hard way that the most one can ever do with evil is give it a good thrashing and send it on its way.

It can take a long time to be in a position to give evil a good thrashing; until then the most that can be done is what the Russians did in Syria: try to hold the line and speak the truth as loudly as possible. And pray like mad.

Sunday, February 3

In the old days, humanity had 1 category for craziness -- craziness -- with the causes breaking down into roughly 4 categories: mischevious spirits, vengeful demons, annoyed gods, and the machinations of black magicians. Today, in place of that simple system, psychiatry has identified more than 200 categories of mental disorders, with some of the more "common" ones listed as "depression, bipolar disorder, dementia, schizophrenia, and anxiety disorders." Psychiatrists prefer the term "disorder" to "crazy." Yet all one has to do, as I've done during the past two weeks, is pay close attention to politically-related news and discussion to be aware that there are now societies with a large number of people who can appear sane enough or take enough pills to hold down a job but are actually batshit crazy. The number seems to be increasing, if not skyrocketing, if any indication can be found in the British government's expressed concern last year about worsening "collective mental health" in the United Kingdom, a worsening broadly noted in the society, and which has activated the bureaucratic antibodies.An article about the issue, Our Collective Mental Health Is Getting Worse — But Why?ticks off various reasons to blame the British medical system's paltry attention to the mental health crisis but allows that lifestyles can also be a factor:

Modern, Western lifestyles undermine mental health. Unhealthy diets, lack of physical exercise, loneliness, family break up, childhood neglect and trauma, the pressure of competition in schools and the workplace — the list goes on. Increased investment and improvements to services will never be enough to repair the damage caused by the way we live today.

However, as the findings roll in from brain researchers around the world, it's becoming increasingly clear there's no way a society can be reasonably sane if large numbers of its people have crummy sleep patterns. The findings are shoving science from observed correlations between mental disorders and poor sleep to cause-and-effect; i.e., chronic poor sleep can be a causative factor in a host of mental disorders. The red flag was raised as early as the 1970s when many executives whose business kept them zig-zagging by jet between time zones developed full-blown psychoses. The cause-and-effect discovery by scientists hired by globalized corporations launched blackout curtains and a host of other tactics to help globetrotting employees offset the effects of chronic jet lag. Although the discovery and attendant warnings about sleep deprivation percolated into Western mainstream media, here we are today with few prepared to confront the implications of that early research and the recent findings. One reason is that the emphasis quickly shifted from psychosis to poor physical health. In other words, doctors didn't go around telling medical reporters that the whole damn society would go crazy if people didn't get enough of the right kind of sleep; instead, they emphasized the role of sleep in maintaining good physical health. All that accomplished was to galvanize the chronically sleep deprived to search for offsets -- power naps, megavitamins, herbal recipes, meditation, etc. -- in the attempt to compensate for wrecking their circadian cycle. The quest became a mania in South Korea, one of the most sleep-deprived societies in the world, and thus sleeponomics. Yet mental illness has become so widespread in South Korea the topic has its own article in Wikipedia, which examines all and everything as causative factors except en masse chronic sleep deprivation. The closest Wikipedia gets to the topic is to note a finding published in 2002:

17% of the South Korean population has insomnia, which is a rate comparable to that of insomnia in the United States.[23]

Without reading the study, I'd question whether it makes a clear distinction between insomnia -- the inability to sleep -- and a lifestyle choice leading to chronic sleep deprivation. In any case, nothing I've come across so far in the literature indicates the South Koreans are considering that there's a direct, cause-and-effect connection between their widespread mental disorders and famous sleeplessness.

There would be good reasons for South Koreans to refrain from looking for any such connection; it would be the same in the U.K., here in the USA, and any other highly urbanized society that depends on global trade and consumerism. Yet while such societies can get by with large numbers under treatment for poor physical health -- that's what the medical and pharmaceutical industries are for -- it's something close to auto-genocide if they normalize practices bound to drive large numbers of their people crazy.

That's where we are today. That's the greatest threat humanity faces today. The really bad news is that this is not only about getting more hours of sleep -- something the sleeponomics sales pitches overlook. It's also about the type of sleep. Short yourself on REM sleep and you're asking for big trouble. I'll close with remarks from a Pundita reader in response to my January 2 posting of a transcript at Business Insider, which I titled "The Scariest Warning Out There To Get Enough Sleep" (actually the warning in this post should be scarier but the other is from a bona fide sleep expert):

ATM said...Getting enough sleep is critical, but it should be pointed out that it is not simply a question of getting a specified number of hours, it must be the right kind of sleep.For example:

AlsoI suspect that the number of images that one views during screen time may interfere with [normal] memory formation. I recommend turning images off.

In response to my two-part question about his second remark he wrote:

Q: 1.I assume you mean ad images on internet sites.....2.And by shutting them off I assume you mean using an ad blocker; if my guess is wrong, or if additional imagine blocking can be done, please let me know.

A: 1.Yes, what I think is happening is that ads force us to multitask while reading and multitasking is known to lower IQ.

Quote:

IQ drops of 15 points for multitasking men lowered their scores to the average range of an 8-year-old child.

I suspect that some categories of screen time involve frequent multitasking and the way that it lowers IQ is by damaging short term memory. It would be nice if a study made an attempt to isolate causation, instead modern scientist[s] seem to vaguely wave their hands as if any screen was a work of witchcraft stealing the [soul]. If information is not kept long enough in short term memory it will not make it into long term memory where connections between memories are made.2.Yes in theory, however ad blockers do not work very well because they are detected and many sites force you to shut them off.

If you are on linux you can use a Text Browser like Lynx. If you are on Windows you might use Browsh with Firefox, which gives your a browser 1997 feel except with better fonts. Browsh is not detected as an ad blocker because it is a post processing Firefox input.

A simple solution is to turn off javascript.

https://whoer.net/blog/article/how-to-disable-javascript-in-browsers/

Except that may remove more information from a site than you want and is also detected.

It was once quite easy to navigate the internet with a pure text browser, but the internet lords are making it very hard for the blind these days. Text readers or brail readers for the blind only work well when you can extract ham from the spam on a site.